“The Road” has a straightforward plot. It’s set in an American mid-west that has been devastated by an unnamed apocalyptic event. Fires burn intensely and randomly across the land, destroying everything in their paths. The air is so choked with ash that no plants or animals other than humans and dogs survive and so little sunlight is able to permeate that the world is engulfed in an endless winter. Those few humans that have escaped this disaster have reverted to a nightmare medieval existence; some have banded together to form cannabilistic gangs whilst others hide themselves away in fear, slowly wasting away from hunger and cold. Across this forlorn landscape, an unnamed father and his young son wander – aimlessly, though the father is loathe to admit it. They push all of their worldly posessions in a cart and must scavenge for food in the various abandoned houses, shops and garages that they come across.

“The Road” is the first book I’ve ever finished that I wanted to re-read immediately. Everything about it is fantastic and makes me want to gush absurdly. It’s one of those rare books that will stay with me for a long time. Despite the anguish that it describes, the hopelessness of the situation that the main characters find themselves in, the sheer nightmare hellishness of this post-apocalyptic world through which they walk, it is still a book about hope and, for some weird reason, I found it spiritually uplifting in a way that I can’t remember ever experiencing in a book before. I guess that that’s what happens when the previous book you read was a dumb space opera by Peter Hamilton.

To continue gushing, even the prose was perfect. There wasn’t a single needless word and the lack of any punctuation other than full-stops simply served to undermine the bleakness of the world that the central characters inhabit. The moment where the father and son discover the people in the basement whose body parts are being harvested for food by their captors actually made me flinch with horror and I distinctly remember measuring my breath during the passage where the man and boy watch the marauders march by. That’s how convincing McCarthy’s vision is.

I’ve read rumours that this is to be filmed and that Viggo Mortenson is in the frame to play the father – the only way that that could be any better is if they have David Cronenberg direct it.

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